A website continues to post personal information about Blizzard employees despite the company reversing its stance requiring people to use their real identity to post online.

Critics say the move by Blizzard isn’t enough.

Irvine-based Blizzard Entertainment, which is a division of Activision Blizzard, announced early last week it would require people to use their real first and last name to continue posting on the company’s busy forums at Battle.net as part of the company’s rollout of “Real ID,” a companywide move to allow people to use their real identity with the company’s popular games. After three days of intense pressure on the company’s forums and elsewhere on the Web, Blizzard announced on Friday that it had reversed course.

“We’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums,” Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime announced to the forums directly on Friday.

Morhaime was the latest target of the site titled “A Snowstorm By Any Other Name” on Saturday as an anonymous poster linked information about Morhaime’s entire family tree as well as links to his wedding page.

“Can you believe that Mike posted that message about real ID in the WoW forums while on his honeymoon in Hawaii? That’s some dedication,” said the anonymous poster.

The information being posted by the blog appears to be already freely available online, but includes e-mail addresses, home address, phone numbers and more personal information all located in a central location that could potentially be used to intimidate Blizzard employees.

Moving to Real ID is optional for players, according to Blizzard. The company will not require customers to use their Real ID to play Bizzard games like World of Warcraft and upcoming Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. However, if one opts-in to using Real ID their real first and last name will be displayed not only to online friends, but to “friends of friends.” That is, otherwise unconnected people are able to see one another’s name solely through association to the same common person.

Here’s how the anonymous poster describes the concern over the feature:

“The ONLY thing I’m asking for is a simple checkbox for “share my full name with friends of friends”. Maybe an option for “Hide my online status” so you can log on a game without all of your friends seeing you. I don’t see why I should have far LESS privacy in an online video game (that shouldn’t even be connected to my real life) than I do in real life. The issues are still very real, and Blizzard is eliminating entire classes of people from a soon-to-be-major component of the game… The only reason it’s not that way is because, like the forum name debacle, Blizzard is intentionally trying to push something for some unknown reason.”

Blizzard reiterated in its Friday announcement that its plans had not changed for games and that Real ID will enable communications functionality that will “make Battle.net a great place for players to stay connected to real-life friends and family while playing Blizzard games.”

Blizzard is working on an upcoming Massively Multiplayer Online game for which few details are known. When asked if there was a possibility a future game will require people to use their real identity to play, the company said “we haven’t announced any plans along these lines.”

The fear of losing anonymity in online games is a real concern, “not paranoia,” for people who don’t want their interest in video games learned by employers or prospective, said Bonnie Nardi, an anthropology professor at UC Irvine and author of “My Life as a Night Elf Priest,” a book about World of Warcraft written from the perspective of an anthropologist.

“Many people want to remain anonymous in-game all the time or some of the time — part of the point of play is to escape the ordinary. Lots of silliness, flirtation, use of sexualized and scatological language take place in-game. Not everyone wants that exposed, and yet it’s fun and restorative to be in a space outside the bounds of conventional expectations,” said Nardi. “The comforts of the small town — familiarity, shared history, and mutual aid — do not come with exposure on the Internet. You get the bad part, the loss of privacy part, and the added disadvantage of ever more marketing, accompanied by that creepy feeling that you are being watched,” Nardi said.

If you’re a Blizzard fan, employee or anyone else who feels impacted by Real ID, either directly or indirectly, send an e-mail to ihamilton@ocregister.com and tell us how you’ve been affected. Please do so from an e-mail account you check, so that we can send you follow- up correspondence.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the relationship between Blizzard and Activision. Blizzard Entertainment is a division of Activision Blizzard.

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